Two youths leave a boys school run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, known as UNRWA, in the Shuafat refugee camp in Jerusalem, Monday, Jan. 27, 2025. (Mahmoud Illean/AP)
JERUSALEM — Israel on Thursday formally banned the main United Nations aid agency for Palestinian refugees from operating on its territory despite heavy diplomatic backlash, a move that humanitarian officials warn could have a disastrous impact on aid delivery and jeopardize regional stability in the long term.
The order against the agency, known as UNRWA, went into effect at midnight on Thursday, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said. But hours later, there was no change on the ground except in the most cosmetic sense — right-wing activists clambered up the high stone walls of UNRWA’s headquarters compound in east Jerusalem, yanked down the blue-and-white U.N. flag, hoisting up Israel’s blue-and-white instead.
The building was largely empty. Palestinian staff, who make up the large majority at the headquarters, were encouraged to stay home for their safety, while UNRWA’s international staff — about 50 aid workers — left for Jordan the day before as their visas expired.
For the moment, the array of schools and medical clinics run by UNRWA in east Jerusalem continued to operate, and the agency said there had been no change in its deliveries of aid in the Gaza Strip.
UNRWA provides aid and services to some 2.5 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza and the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem, as well as 3 million more in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023, it has been the main lifeline for a population reliant on humanitarian aid.
Israel’s ban, passed by parliament last October, follows months of attacks on the agency from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies, who claim the agency is deeply infiltrated by Hamas. UNRWA rejects that claim.
The legislation also prohibits contact between Israeli officials and UNRWA employees. The Israeli government says it wants to work with other U.N. agencies and organizations instead.
“There are multiple alternative organizations to UNRWA — including U.N. agencies, international NGOs, and foreign countries — that are already operating to facilitate humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip,” said Oren Marmorstein, a spokesman for Israel’s foreign ministry. “Their role will only increase.”
In Jerusalem, the immediate reaction is confusion
UNRWA officials and Israeli authorities have said the ban aims to put an end to the agency’s work in east Jerusalem — which Palestinians claim for their future state and which Israel annexed after the 1967 Mideast war in a move not recognized by much of the international community.
But students in the Shuafat refugee camp in east Jerusalem, just beyond Israel’s concrete separation barrier with the West Bank, filled their UNRWA classrooms as usual Thursday morning, said Jihad Abu Zneid, former Palestinian lawmaker who runs a women’s center in the camp.
Manal Khayat, the head nurse at the UNRWA-run health center in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City, said authorities had told her two days earlier that they would shut down the clinic after the ban takes effect, without specifying when.
She arrived Thursday bracing for the worst, she said, but opened the clinic at 7 a.m. as she always does, and no one stopped her staff or patients from entering.
“I don’t feel relieved yet because we don’t know what will happen,” she said. “The main product of this whole decision is confusion and fear.”
She added: “We are open. I’m not leaving.” Women in white coats sitting down for breakfast outside the clinic nodded and echoed, “We’re not leaving.”
Upheaval for impoverished families
The sight of nurses chatting and feasting on sesame-sprinkled bread was the reassurance that Amal Julani, 64, needed. She and a dozen other Palestinian patients who rely on the Old City clinic for regular medicine rushed to its pharmacy first thing Thursday to check if it had gone anywhere.
“I was crying last night at the thought of it closing,” Julani said outside the clinic. “Maybe this was all just a political game. God willing, it will continue to be OK.”
Palestinian residents of east Jerusalem, who long have complained of neglect by Israeli municipal authorities, fear that a closure of dozens of U.N.-run health clinics and schools across the city will cause upheaval for impoverished families that have come to depend on those services.
Some Israeli officials have called for the immediate shutdown of those institutions. Others want the agency to be phased out gradually and its work to be replaced by other organizations and municipal schools.
A group of Israeli policemen outside the Old City gates looked relaxed, snacking on peanut-butter corn puffs. They said they had no orders to physically close down anything yet.
Right-wing Israelis revel in a victory
UNRWA was founded in 1949 to care for the more than 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled from or fled their homes in the war over Israel’s creation. Refugees from the wars in 1948 and 1967 passed their refugee status from one generation to the next, growing to nearly 6 million around the region.
Israel has long refused to allow their return. Its political establishment claims the U.N. agency prevents their integration into their host countries and helps perpetuate the idea that they might one day return. Palestinians say they have the right to return under international law, while Israel argues they do not and says a mass return would undermine the Jewish nature of the state.
After the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which triggered Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, Israeli officials accused around a dozen of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff in Gaza of participating in the assault. In response 18 governments froze funding to the agency, though most have since restored it.
An independent review commissioned by the U.N. found that Israel had not provided evidence to support its accusations that many UNRWA staff members belong to Hamas or other militant groups.
On Thursday, several Israeli settlers, who have staged protests calling for the closure of UNRWA for months, gathered outside its east Jerusalem headquarters to celebrate the closure. One activist spray-painted a dark blue Star of David over the entrance sign.
Arieh King, a deputy mayor of Jerusalem, popped a champagne cork, took a swig from the bottle and passed it around, pronouncing it a “happy and special and historic day.”
“It’s time that the Arabs whom UNRWA was caring for integrate into the population here in Jerusalem,” he said.
The U.N. fears further ramifications
U.N. officials have raised concerns about how the shutdown of the sprawling compound, home to aid convoys and vast storage facilities, as well as the freeze on its coordination with Israel, will hinder the delivery of badly needed food and assistance to 2 million Palestinians in Gaza.
UNRWA officials warn the closure comes at a particularly delicate time as the agency oversees a surge of humanitarian aid into the strip as part of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas.
On a symbolic level, Palestinians see Israel’s efforts to take down UNRWA — with its mandate to continue work until a permanent solution to the decades-old conflict can be reached — as an effort to get rid of Palestinian refugees’ “right of return,” among the conflict’s most emotive issues and a key sticking point in peace negotiations.
“For me, for my descendants, the departure of the agency would mean the death of the Palestinian cause,” said Ismail al-Turk, a retired UNRWA teacher in east Jerusalem.
There are also concerns over what it means for multilateralism that a U.N. member state has just banned a U.N. agency.
“It creates an appalling precedent,” said Jonathan Fowler, UNRWA’s senior communications manager. “The international order is far from perfect, but it’s what we’ve got. If you start to unravel it, the risks go far beyond this region.”
